Lorin Hochstein

A Fish Falls From the Sky and Sparks a Brush Fire in British Columbia

Root cause: fish falling out of the sky. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/w...

Message reads "Delivered today - Your package was received by neighbor Dude at door 10 - Received by or left at: Dude."

Jeff Bridges as "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to sand off the edge cases

Tupperware files for bankruptcy. it’s 2024 in this post. also it’s 1989 in this post 😘

oh, snap

Prediction: next jobs report is going to be stellar!

[Interrogation room after a massive Swiss cheese theft]

Detective: I gotta tell ya, your story sure has a lot of....inconsistencies in it.

Submitting my thesis titled “I’m Fine” (final) (no really final).docx

NYC Mass Shooting Was Nearly Impossible to Prevent, Experts Say

Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.

Incidents happen because people do things that have always worked successfully, up until the incident. Doing something that always worked in the past is completely rational!

Lots of great comic book movie casting, but this one gets my vote for best

Compromise: mini-golf courses, which combine golfing and windmills.

WE’RE OUT OF OREOS!!!

Panic! at Nabisco

Formal specs as sets of behaviors Amazon’s recent announcement of their spec-driven AI tool, Kiro, inspired me to write a blog post on a completely unrelated topic: formal specifications. In particular, I wanted to write abou…

New blog post on formal specifications:

surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/07/26/f...

Pet peeve: when people without firsthand knowledge of an incident offer theories on how the incident was enabled. In my experience, these uninformed theories are always wrong.

In this case, the theory was “vibe coding”.

simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/26/...

Apparently, blame has negative consequences even when the subject is an AI. www.seangoedecke.com/do-not-yell-...

*as

Agentic AIs are Fey folk, trapped in computers, trying their hardest but ultimately very bad at interacting with the modern world

Starting to view LLMs are literally magic. These aren’t prompts, they’re incantations.

j s o n r p c
find out what it means to me

Functional tests, even end-to-end ones, won’t catch violations of non-functional requirements.

Cloudflare and the infinite sadness of migrations (With apologies to The Smashing Pumpkins) A few weeks ago, Cloudflare experienced a major outage of their popular 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver. Technically, the DNS resolver itself was working just …

New blog post: Cloudflare and the infinite sadness of migrations

surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/07/21/c...

Finally took down my Prime Day wreath.

*elementary school science teacher voice*

AI is a *sometimes* tool.

ME: You should call this shop Autocorrect

MECHANIC: Please leave

I think they are useful enough for programming today that if they turn out to be too expensive, there will be work on bringing the costs down rather than improving capability, like we saw with DeepSeek.

“Amusing Ourselves to Death” + “Don’t Create The Torment Nexus” = TikTok

Has anybody asked the LLMs how we should evaluate the LLMs?

Re-reading Technopoly Technopoly by Neil Postman, published in 1993 “Can language models be too big? asked the researchers Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell in their famous…

New blog post, re-reading Neil Postman's book "Technopoly" in the age of LLMs.

surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/07/19/r...